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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29464638">Between This Breath And The Next</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitecompositions/pseuds/infinitecompositions'>infinitecompositions</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Pluck the Strings of Destiny [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Violence, Espionage, Gen, Rated For Violence, combat trials, taking the throne</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 20:35:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>13,124</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29464638</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitecompositions/pseuds/infinitecompositions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“She won her throne in combat, though. Her family was supposed to bow before the last King of Alderaan and she said no. She said if he wanted her family, he had to kill her first. And when they met on the field, she was the one left standing and he had a vibroblade through his neck. That was years ago, but we all remember it.”</i><br/><br/>Breha Organa of Alderaan was not always meant to be Queen. But sometimes, even without training in the Force, one can reshape their reality.<br/><br/>[Updates Mondays; Rating for violence]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bail Organa/Breha Organa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Pluck the Strings of Destiny [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2158455</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. In/Justice</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is based on a comment in Chapter 2 of <i>We Brothers, We Sisters, We Vod'e Few</i>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Breha is ten when her uncle is arrested. Her uncle works with the King, is a trusted advisor, he would never betray Alderaan like all her friends say he would.</p><p>Her uncle is her best friend, is fun and funny. Is the person she feels closest to, and who loves her so, so much. If he could betray Alderaan, what is she? She has always been loyal to her planet – she has met the King. Her uncle introduced them when she was seven. The man laughed at her dress, the hem just a shade high because she hit a growth spurt shortly before the event and her mother, wrapped in work, pregnancy, and her father’s illness, had not had a chance to see and help her find a new one.</p><p>The King seemed… kind was a stretch of a word. He seemed like a decent enough man. Perhaps she would like the tales of her childhood to echo with truth and for the King to embody the virtues of Alderaan, but her mother has told her, as she reached and passed her tenth birthday, that she ought to pull away, just a bit, from her fancy.</p><p>Her uncle is arrested in the middle of their home, though, in the middle of a family party. There is a calm dinner and then there are King's men coming into their home and taking her uncle out despite protest from him and Breha.</p><p>Her mother is frozen in her seat, her father is quiet and glancing between her mother and the arrest of her uncle. Breha is pushed away by one of the men. When she is older, she will know to call it gentle. But Breha is ten, and she feels it aggressive and wants to chase again after her uncle. Her mother has stood by now, though, and pulled her to the side.</p><p>She asks her mother, later, if they might visit her uncle in prison. There is a strange man in the office with her who gives Breha a harsh look while her mother ushers her out the door with a harsh word. Her mother, so rarely harsh, glares her down in the hallway. “You mustn’t ask after him, Breha. He betrayed the King.”</p><p>She doesn’t want her uncle to be a traitor. She wants him to sneak into her room and tell her a story like she’s little again. Wants him to say something silly with the utmost seriousness at dinner, just to make her mother sigh and roll her eyes – the closest Breha ever sees her to laughing. She wants him to take her back to the planetarium and tell her about the relief missions he has run, like he has so many times before.</p><p>Breha is ten when she learns what it means to have known a traitor.</p><p>Children at school give her a wide berth. All she has, then, is her academics. Her teachers are fair enough – nothing in marking changes, not that she notices. They are dispassionate. They teach the class, of which she is part. </p><p>But no one will be seen with her.</p><p>There is to be no trial, and the day it is announced Breha cries and locks herself in her room. School be damned (not that her mother can ever know her uncle had once taught her to swear <em>properly</em>, like a real spacer), she refuses. She doesn’t budge.</p><p>What more can she lose? What more can the King’s proclamation of guilt take? It took her friends, who stay away from her on their parents’ orders. It took her connection to teachers. It took her freedom – her mother seldom lets her out.</p><p>She is not proud to say she manipulates her parents in this, in the after of it all. But she knows her mother will dismiss the request out of hand. If she argues it successfully to her father, though, he might convince her and then Breha can… She can start fresh.</p><p>Breha is ten when her little sister is born. She is a tiny thing, and in the face of what is coming she thinks that it is supremely unfair. Breha is ten years old, she can fight and kick and scream.</p><p>What does her baby sister know of how to escape? Of when to cry for help? When to stay silent? Breha wants to love the child her mother holds onto, the child that seems to strengthen her father against his illness. But all she can find in herself is a firm dispassion.</p><p>Sira Organa is a tiny thing, dark-haired like Breha and her mother. With blue eyes, like Father.</p><p>Breha finds – <em>collates</em>, that’s a word she has learned in researching – data. About boarding schools, about academic achievement <em>therein</em>. About the benefits of schooling on Coruscant versus on Alderaan. She is determined to get off planet and find at least a bit of reprieve.</p><p>Her uncle is to have no trial, but that does not mean his sentence will come quick. The King delays and delays the day. Some speculate – is it out of remorse for his once friend, memory of once was? Does he wait for House Organa to plead his case, plead the King’s mercy?</p><p>Does he suspect more in House Organa? In the other Houses? Is there something acting against them here, is her uncle turning in other traitors? </p><p>Ansu, a boy at her school, thinks as much. He shoves Breha to the ground and then, as she gets up, grabs her hair and yanks her head around. “Your uncle isn’t just a traitor, he’s got no loyalty at all, does he?”</p><p>The Alderaanians prize loyalty, their King says. The Alderaanians prize life, Breha thinks. That is why they do so much relief work across the galaxy. That is why they work so hard for others.</p><p>Breha is ten years old when her uncle’s sentence is finally given. Public execution. House Organa is expected to stand behind him as witness – <em>an intimidation tactic</em>, her mother whispers to her father in the dead of night when both girls are supposed to be long asleep.</p><p>Breha wonders what that means for her family. Are they expected to weep? To mourn? Or is she to swallow her grief for a man whose wide smiles always promised a delightful evening?</p><p>She presents the information to her father. She is remanded, as the rest of House Organa is, to stay on-planet until the day of the execution. They are prisoners on their own planet in the face of her uncle’s crimes.</p><p>And they must be his crimes. Because everyone pushes him to accept them and claim them as his own. There is, it is rumored, a taped confession being held in palace archives.</p><p>Her father looks over the information she gives him and shakes his head. “Your mother won’t like it. But there is sense in it.”</p><p>He has barely read it. He must have been thinking of something similar, and it settles a cold pit in Breha’s stomach. How much danger is her family in, that her father would send her off-world without so much fight? Without making her argue for it, like she anticipated? He and Mother – they always promised to keep her close. Said that family was the only thing they had in the end and to treasure it, just as they told her to treasure Sira when she arrived, for all Breha still only feels that cold feeling whenever she sees her sister around.</p><p>She avoids her. She thinks she is good at hiding it.</p><p>Sira is so, so fragile. So, so easily broken and injured. How is Breha supposed to protect her? How are Mother and Father supposed to protect her?</p><p>Breha is ten years old, only ten, when she stands on the stage erected in the palace lawn. The public of the capital city have been <em>cordially invited</em> to see the execution. The posters and the news have all spoken of high crimes, of treasons and traitors, and they sneer at House Organa standing in sedated colors befitting the occasion.</p><p>Red, for blood and treachery. An Alderaanian color fitting a disownment. Blue, for understanding and loyalty. An acceptance that yes, they fostered a traitor. That they must atone.</p><p>Breha knows the colors and what they mean – she suspects the child of any member of Alderaanian office knows, and from a young age. You do not wear red to a formal affair, you do not wear green to a funeral.</p><p>Breha wears a green and white pendant on a gold chain under her dress, carefully pinned with stolen sewing pins to the under-dress so nothing will show. Gold, fidelity. She will not betray her uncle if she can avoid it, not in her mind. Green, admiration for her beloved uncle.</p><p>White, rejection of injustice. That is what this is. She does not know, does not understand entirely, but something tells her, <em>whispers in her ear</em> that something is not right here. Something is very wrong.</p><p>Her uncle is no traitor. He does not deserve his death.</p><p>She stands between her mother and father. She stands in the center, her face towards her uncle’s back. She could reach out and touch him, he is so close, but she has been told <em>repeatedly</em> not to. Do not look at the crowd. Do not look sympathetic. Do not speak to him. Do not reach for him. Do not think of seeming, in any way, supportive.</p><p>She wears red and blue on the outside. A dark blue jacket, nearly a mourning-black, over a red dress. She is glad for the red when the execution turns out to be a bloody affair. The red hides it, at least until she gets home. Her mother scolds her when she takes the dress and casts it into the first fire she finds before anyone can stop her.</p><p>She will never wear the damned thing again. Not that, not the karking shoes, or the half-karked jacket that still has small stains towards its center from the blood spray.</p><p>The shoes she threw out, but they make their way into her closet again. A maid, then. They’ve had four graciously hired on their behalf by the King. Something tips Breha off about them, and she refuses to trust them.</p><p>The jacket is always lain primly over the back of the chair in her room.</p><p>She has three tendays through which she must suffer. Her father, quietly, has told her he is sending her off planet.</p><p>He is sending her. He has not cleared it through her mother, but then he married into House Organa. He would not have the power, should her mother say no, to send Breha away on his own. This is safest for both of them. To send her away so quietly and discreetly to the girls’ boarding school on Coruscant.</p><p>She will be safer there, he tells her the night she leaves.</p><p>She is only more enraged. The people of Coruscant have tales of a benevolent Alderaan with a kind people and generous King.</p><p>Where was that generosity when Breha watched her uncle executed?</p><p>Coruscant is loud, incredibly so, but not loud enough.</p><p>She wakes many nights swallowing her screams – she trusts the people around her less than she trusted the maids hired by the King .</p><p>Coruscant is bright and cold – all the buildings carry a faint chill to them, at least the ones her school exposes her to. But they are not cold enough to erase the feeling of hot blood splattered against her right cheek, just under her eye. To erase the feeling of her uncle’s blood, and the force with which it hit her cheek, rolled down in the moments after the execution, when the King went on and on about the value of loyalty, the need for trust.</p><p>She has one teacher, the only person on Coruscant she trusts. She turns to her, one day after class.</p><p>“What if a planet needs their leader changed, but they cannot do it themselves. What does the Republic do then?”</p><p>Because there are planets that have been mired in centuries of war. There are planets choking under the hand of their rulers. And the Republic says they stand for the people, but what of these people?</p><p>“The Republic does what it can, Lady Organa. But it is not perfect. It is not omnipotent.”</p><p>And Breha is led to believe, in that moment, that there is nothing to be done for her planet. Nothing that can be changed.</p><p>She cannot accept that. It is in the dark of the night that she vows to herself, swears on the death of her uncle, on the heat of his blood on her cheek and the fear she may one day have to feel that again, that she will find a way to pull Alderaan away from the King.</p><p>She must do something. She cannot sit back, she cannot face the idea that her mother, her father, her sister could be next.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Breha is an untrained Force sensitive. I believe I referenced as much in WBWSWVF, but it makes some appearances here because I wanted to explore more what it would look like for untrained Force sensitives. She doesn't have the same Force powers that Jedi have, but the Force definitely talks to her.<br/>2. Breha doesn't consider herself a child, really, anymore, but it doesn't get concretely identified in her head until later. She just knows, in this chapter, that something is very different for her emotionally.<br/>3. So this chapter is told from the perspective of a ten year old, which means some details got intentionally bungled. What happened is that, because Alderaan is under a corrupt leader, the trial was a closed-door trial with no one in attendance. A show-trial, at best; because Breha is ten she hears that her uncle was found guilty and is missing that detail and assumes there was no trial.<br/>4. Again, to clarify: he has been sentenced, but Breha is ten and therefore sees the delaying as his sentencing being delayed not the carrying out of the sentence.<br/>5. I made up all the color symbolism for Alderaan and have no source for it, just a heads up.<br/>6. Breha isn't actually apathetic to her sister, even though later she calls it that. She is traumatized and she doesn't want something to happen to her, because if an adult couldn't protect themselves what is supposed to protect a child?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Pro/Vocation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Breha is fourteen when she finds something useful. Four years of consuming her waking moments with the knowledge that she will one day depose the King, of knowing there must be <em>some way</em>.</p><p>And there is. An old, ancient law, only in effect by technicality alone. But no one has seen fit to repeal it, and so she will exploit that technicality for all it is worth. She starts sneaking out of her dorms and finding places willing to teach an Alderaanian noble girl to fight, and to fight dirty. Teach her to take a hit, to fall and get back up because she knows the battle ahead will be anything but forgiving.</p><p>She finds her battlemaster in the form of an older Zabrak woman who is unforgiving in critiquing her forms, in righting her posture, and in pushing her <em>further, Breha. You won’t win any fights like that. </em></p><p>It is liberating. The pounding of fists on pads, the force of the fall, the speed of the throw. The bruising on her chest, her arms, her legs all remind her that she is making progress. She's getting better. The ache in her muscles is another indicator. When they progress to training with knives, the small cuts she gets in training are reminders of where to watch, how to block, how to save her own skin when the time comes. </p><p>Her mother visits, unannounced, sometimes. And it is that that worries Breha. Her concerns are proven when she comes back to the dorm with a stiff back and a bruise curling its way around her neck from where Ilnara, her battlemaster, had twisted and ripped her into a strong grip, drove her to the ground, and pressed her arm into Breha’s neck with a force so hard as to make breathing difficult a moment.</p><p>Her mother’s eyes are fraught as she looks at her.</p><p>“What have you gotten into?”</p><p>“It’s just an extracurricular, mother. Self-defense – my sparring partner and I got a little overzealous, that’s all.”</p><p>“I know they don’t teach self-defense here.”</p><p>Her mother had been livid when Breha had been secreted away to attend a Coruscanti boarding school without her knowledge or consent. She had not written Breha or responded to her comms for weeks, and her father confessed that it would likely be a while before either of them were in her good graces again. Losing her brother, then her daughter, he had said, must have been difficult on her.</p><p>
  <em>“I’m still here. I’m just on Coruscant. I’m still alive.” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“She would likely just want to put eyes on you, dear girl.” </em>
</p><p>Well, a few times a year she did just that. She came to Coruscant, ran relevant errands that could, theoretically, have been run on Alderaan, and then she put eyes on her daughter. She sat with her, talked with her of her sister and her former school and her former life. Breha listens attentively each time, dutiful as her daughter and muted with the knowledge she will be, sometime soon, carrying out a coup.</p><p>She can feel it simmering beneath her skin, alight with anticipation and the knowledge that it comes closer with each day. Patience is a virtue, and patience may save her. She just needs to see through to the next day. The next battle is one of finishing her schooling, of finding the proper terms of challenge, now that she knows there is such a thing.</p><p>More than that, she needs to consider official support. She will get nowhere without it and she needs it more than anything, if she is to succeed and take the throne from the King. Having a throne and no one to listen will make actually ruling difficult.</p><p>She will be his successor. That is the law, and sometime in the days, months, years between now and then she must learn governance. Must learn when to hold back and when to push forward. She supposes, in many ways, there is no better place to learn than Coruscant. Than the seat of Republic democracy and all it entails.</p><p>She will be the monarch, but she can learn how to sway a people here. How to guide them. How to lead them.</p><p>Her mother looks at her. “You always got a look in your eye, when you were little, when you wanted to start trouble. Sira gets it, too – not that you would know that, or that she is nearly the troublemaker you were.</p><p>“Whatever you are planning, Breha, <em>don’t</em>. You are under strict orders and guard, even here. You know that.”</p><p>She is under strict guard, yes. At the start of her second year the King had demanded it. The beloved niece of a traitor must be watched. She may, too, betray her land and people.</p><p>She would betray the King, and she will do it gladly the day she cuts his throat for all to see. Her mother wisely drops the issue. Better to have deniability, Breha can imagine her thinking, when her daughter joins her brother. </p><p>And being under strict guard <em>helps</em>. Because she has to be skilled to escape her room – a single room. She is not permitted a roommate by order of the King. She may use them to assist in planning a rebellion against him. He grows more paranoid and obsessed with the perceived threats to his reign everyday and it thrills her. A fearful opponent may make a mistake, misstep. And that will be to her favor. </p><p>She has to be skilled to hide her research, her plans, her fighting practice even. Because a bruise may be noticed, but if she drops a textbook hard enough on the ground, she can say she fell into something. They must think her <em>so clumsy</em>, these guards who roll their eyes and call her the “junk assignment”. Those that look too closely, she makes a sob story - boys from the school who are bullying her. Girls who are just <em>so mean</em>. She plays up the privileged child and she knows she doesn't fool all of them, but she fools enough. </p><p>She is the last assignment any of them want, and she is the punishment for many more. But she will take that and she will use it and everything else within her power to hone her skills.</p><p>Because it is coming. The power under her skin sings with it, and guides her to the right people, the right books, the right places. She will not <em>fail.</em> She cannot, she refuses it outright. There is no room for failure, just as there is no room to include, to implicate, her family in this.</p><p>“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mother.”</p><p>Breha may not know Sira. She may still feel that apathy towards her that shields her from the worst of her curiosities and from the worst of her worries, but she knows that she would not stand for it if someone were to accuse her. If someone were to accuse her mother or father she would <em>fight, she would die</em>.</p><p>But, Breha notes, her instructors have always said she was made of “sterner stuff”, of older mettle that wore hardship like a badge promising victory in the end.</p><p>Because victory will be hers.</p><p>“The King is ordering you home at the end of the semester.”</p><p>“That’s nothing new.”</p><p>“He means for the remainder of your education, Breha. Whatever you’re doing that is getting his attention, it stops <em>now.</em> It was foolish of me to allow you to <em>stay</em> on Coruscant when your father sent you away.”</p><p>“Sending me to Coruscant kept me sane, Mother.”</p><p>Because she would be haunted, even now, when she returned to Alderaan. She may never see her family home the same way knowing that her uncle was arrested there, that her uncle’s last days must have been fear and misery before the executioner did his duty and her uncle’s blood stained her clothes.</p><p>She still feels the blood land on her cheek, some nights when she lingers in that space between wakeful and sleeping.</p><p>Breha does as she is asked. She goes home and is the dutiful daughter. She watches her sister, and tends to her father, who is ill once more.</p><p>He will not last the year, the physicians say, and they are right. Before the summer is over and her schooling resumes, she buries another member of her family. This one to illness, though, and there is peace in that that Breha craves. She has not felt peace in so long. She misses her father, she mourns his passing, but he wasn't taken <em>by</em> someone. He was taken by nature, by illness. </p><p>She has felt fear for so long her bones no longer ache with it, they sing in harmony with it. Her muscles move and tighten the way they must to keep herself as far out of reach as necessary. Fear is a companion like few others, and she clings to it as she must.</p><p>It will keep her sharp, if she keeps it in moderation.</p><p>Alderaan is just as beautiful when she returns as ever. The forests, the lakes – the places where the people aren’t. Where she doesn’t see tight smiles and shifting eyes. Her mother, the one time she had confided in her of it, said she was imagining it. And maybe… Sometimes she wonders. She has never been the same, not since she was ten.</p><p>That same thrum under her skin, though… It tells her she is right. Something is wrong on Alderaan. And the people feel it too. Maybe that is why one of their biggest exports, instead of being any kind of industry, is doctors. Workers, too. People who get off-world and work to stay off-world. They say they are doing good, but they are also avoiding the King’s wrath. Breha knows, in some part of her, she would be following that same path if she had not made up her mind to depose the King.</p><p>She never speaks of it. She knows it is dangerous, she knows better. Her uncle was declared a traitor for no reason, she will not give reason to be so declared. She would never tell her mother, who is working tirelessly on Alderaan to maintain their family’s standing, that she intends to shatter any illusion that Breha Organa learned from the mistakes of her uncle.</p><p>She knows there is a recording. She does not know she ever wants to see it. Her uncle was held for weeks, she does not know what was done to him in that time. She stopped reading some of her books for her literature courses, reading notes on them instead.</p><p>Her imagination does not need the help of the brusque descriptions of torture or tactics in Mandalorian prose fiction from the height of their Empire, or the waxing, poetic descriptions of courtly love devolving into horrid tests of love and commitment meant to rend the lovers in two from ancient Sullust to fuel her imagination of what torture was visited upon her uncle.</p><p>She dreams of it too regularly. She should seek help, but she cannot share this with anyone. Not until she has settled this matter, when her fate has been sealed one way or the other. She cannot risk bringing harm to her family talking to a therapist who then tells the King what she is planning.</p><p>“Coruscant has let you become distant with us.”</p><p>Breha sighs. She had hoped her mother’s silence was indication she was considering letting Breha stay. She should have known better. Her mother would not intercede on her behalf with the King.</p><p>“You always said I needed to let go of fancy, to grow up. Isn’t part of growing up separating from your family?”</p><p>“Not separating, Breha, being able to stand on your own.” She glances around the barren room. “And I’m not so sure this counts.”</p><p>Breha will not let anything stand that could implicate her.</p><p>“So, the King orders me back.”</p><p>“I did not ask him to, Breha.”</p><p> But she did not disagree. And Breha knows, deep inside just as deep as she knows her own fate will be sealed in a few years’ time, that her mother is justified. Arguably, even, she is right to want her daughter home with her. She knows it, but she chafes against it.</p><p>She will have to find a new battlemaster. She will have to learn to fight on her own, if she can’t, and at worst she will find herself facing a far more thorough guard and watch group against her when she is working towards her plans.</p><p>But she has no choice, so she leaves at the end of the semester. She comes home and stays in a room that is still decorated the same as it was when she left. She has come home a handful of times, and this room was for sleep and nothing else.</p><p>She sets about stripping it of the childhood decorations, and that is when Sira approaches her.</p><p>“You shouldn’t get rid of that, it’s pretty.”</p><p>It’s an old doll. One that had been given to her when she was so young, she could not remember now who had given it to her.</p><p>“Do you want her?”</p><p>Sira looks up at Breha. “You’re my sister.”</p><p>It’s a statement of fact as much as it is a wondering question posed at someone that Sira has never really met. Breha has only been home for short periods of time, taking any relief mission that was looking for younger companions on it when she had to stay on Alderaan for an extended period. It was hard, but she usually found one or two; she has been "home" for long breaks twice and been off-world for most of those. She has not interacted much at all with Sira.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Sira nods, she looks at the doll again, and Breha wonders if she’s uncomfortable saying ‘yes’, taking the doll from someone she barely knows. “Here.”</p><p>“Why are you back?”</p><p>Breha smirks. “Want the house to yourself again?”</p><p>Sira’s eyes widen. “No! I’m excited you’re back! But you haven’t been back in forever.”</p><p>Breha shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it, little one.</p><p>“I’m back for now, that’s what matters.”</p><p>She will let it matter, at least for now.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. I am basing the training stuff on my own training experiences from when I took Krav Maga.<br/>2. There are absolutely guards who have suspicions and relay them to the King, but keep in mind she is fourteen. She is still very unreliable and she is not fully wise to the world. When she looks back as an adult she can see that she didn't fool nearly so many as she thought, but that there was just not enough evidence to do anything about it other than recall her to Alderaan.<br/>3. It's only when she's fourteen that Breha isn't thinking about the potential for failure. By the time she gets older, which should come through next chapter, she is very aware that failure is a very real possibility. I'm trying to show a realistic progression from ten to about twenty-two/twenty-three but as a twenty-something myself it's been a while since I was fourteen.<br/>4. The "sterner stuff" is teachers recognizing that she has a stubborn streak that she ends up working to her benefit. It isn't necessarily a compliment, but she takes it as one.<br/>5. Breha isn't turning into a dark sider with this whole fear thing; she's just become very desensitized to it and because she's dealing with it so long without any sort of counseling she's essentially internalizing it and forcing it into a positive thing in any way she can.<br/>6. "recording": I originally had "She knows there is a tape", because I'm just old enough to remember video cassettes and refer to recordings as "being on tape". Thought I'd share my "ah shit that doesn't mesh with the world" moment.<br/>7. I'm trying, with fourteen-year-old Breha, to give off the vibe of "More mature than the average fourteen year old, but still very much overestimating herself"; I hope I've succeeded.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Un/Daunted</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When she finishes her schooling on Alderaan she has to petition and argue and fight for the opportunity to go back to Coruscant for university. An acceptance to an off-world Core-world normally was all that was needed to attend that university and guarantee the degree transferred home.</p><p>For Breha, it was spent petitioning and arguing with person after person until she stood in front of the King himself.</p><p>He’s gray in the temple, now. He has evaded justice for years but he cannot evade age and death.</p><p>Breha is struck by the thought that every chance exists that he may one day die before she can strike him down herself. And his daughter would take his place. Breha knows nothing of the princess, but what can she expect of her, knowing what she knows of Alderaan’s King? How will he have raised her, and what will she do in her reign? </p><p>“It is a tremendous amount of trust you are asking me to show you.”</p><p>“What have I done to make you question my loyalty to Alderaan?”</p><p>He eyes her, suspicion in his every line. “I don’t know that you’ve done <em>anything</em>. But I do know that you are quiet and tenacious. Two qualities that can be worrisome.</p><p>“Your uncle was much the same way.”</p><p>She is the traitor’s beloved niece. She wears the pendant under her blouse, the chain pinned carefully to her undergarments to keep it out of sight. For the meeting it was a plain dark blue dress with lavender accents. <em>Respect before authority</em>. Everything the daughter of a Noble house was to show the King.</p><p>“I am loyal to Alderaan, Your Grace. To her people, her principles.”</p><p>“And her King?”</p><p>Breha declines her head towards the King, a traditional gesture of respect. Let him make of that what he will.</p><p>“I shouldn’t let you go. But, I would rather you get an education of some sort than be held responsible for your becoming some sort of failure or drain; you didn’t apply to a single Alderaanian university. In fact, this was the only university you applied for. It<em> is</em> prestigious, and you have been accepted. But given the lack of other options open to you, the number you closed off by only applying to one school, I still require convincing.”</p><p>“There is a professor in their History department I have long admired and wish to study under if possible.” She plays up the attributes of this professor and that they have a shared interest in a niche historical topic. She speaks at length before demurring. “Apologies for rambling, Your Grace.”</p><p>He considers it. “Fine. You will be expected to maintain impeccable grades. We will be keeping an eye on your performance.”</p><p>And her activities, she assumes. That has never hindered her before in seeking training or in seeking information. She will not let it do so now.</p><p>She had played her cards right, then. It had been a gamble, applying only to one university and only to one’s off-world. The King could still have forbade her to attend and kept her on world, delaying her education a year and garnering her more disdain and disappointment from her mother. Instead, he has decided to let her have this small bit of freedom.</p><p>How so very gracious of him.</p><p>She packs her things and is out the proverbial door the second she is able. She feels it in her heart, under her skin.</p><p>The next time she returns home she will either die or take the throne. She has read of a warrior people from thousands of years before – she will come home, will revisit her family home, with her shield or on it.</p><p>She finds the small apartment her mother rented and the first thing she does is get rid of some of the bugs that have been planted, no doubt by the King. To keep an eye on her. She leaves some in place, is sure she missed others. Best to make it look like some cleaning accidents and a little suspicion of the neighbors than actively preventing espionage.</p><p>The university is a cramped set of rooms on several floors of a building not far from the Senate dome. The professor in question, the one she had played up, is indeed everything she had hoped but that is only a side benefit.</p><p>Her battlemaster still lives on Coruscant. She is overjoyed to see Breha and immediately starts drilling her through old forms, watching new ones, and teaching her more of them. It is freeing to work with this woman, who in many ways is trusted implicitly. She never asks questions of Breha – not why she needs training, not where she is from, not what her plans are. Nothing but what she has done for training. Anything Breha tells her is swallowed with whatever information she deems relevant to Breha and her study of fighting.</p><p>She meets Bail on accident. He is going to a different part of the lower levels, to a party he later admits. He is young, he is from a lower noble house on Alderaan and he has a little leeway as a second son. He is not the heir and image of the Prestor family, he is barely noted by those who take interest in the family at all. </p><p>They run into one another and he leaves his party behind, not that Breha knows it in the moment, because he is intrigued when she says she is attending a self-defense lesson.</p><p>“I suppose it's good to know, living on Coruscant like we do.”</p><p>He leaves with her, and they talk on the way back. They attend the same university. They both study politics. Breha studies the benevolent monarchies of the past, the policies they enacted. They are her preparation.</p><p>Bail studies the histories of republics. How they rise, how they fall, why they have stuck as a preferred and lasting form of governance in so many countries, then planets, then for the galaxy writ large. After all, he argues, things stick for a reason. He is the first to admit it is not always a good reason, but nonetheless their talk is often mixed between the personal and the studious.</p><p>Sometimes, they never say, that reason may be because no one is brave enough to stand up, not yet. That it takes time for the courage to grow.</p><p>Breha never tells him her plan, but he keeps going to the lessons with her. She is leagues above him, but there are times he fails to see an opening and when she confronts him, thinks he is holding back, she realizes that he doesn’t live, like her, in a future battle.</p><p>He keeps going with her to lessons. They stay in touch longer than she anticipated. It is the first time in a very long time she has someone that she is not merely friendly with, but whom she considers a friend. They start taking one class a semester together, to make sure they spend time together beyond self-defense lessons, even when they are busy.</p><p>Breha never tells him her plan, but one day when the doubts creep up he shares it with her.</p><p>She should have done something sooner, her mind tells her. “We’ll get there when we get there,” Bail whispers. He has a key to her apartment. She has a key to his. When she didn’t show up for the class they took together this semester, he came looking.</p><p>“What if we don’t have time?”</p><p>“You’re doing a noble thing, Breha, but going in before your ready will only make things turn out poorly.” He sits beside her. “Let me help you.”</p><p>“How?”</p><p>“I would be honored if I could stand as your second, for a start.”</p><p>She shakes her head. “I do not want it to get there. I do not want another to have to pick up where I failed.”</p><p>Because failure is too real of a possibility for her. She has walked a narrow line for over ten years, now. She has known since she was ten that she would meet the same fate as her uncle if she failed, if not a far more brutal one.</p><p>“And yet it may.”</p><p>And here Bail is. They met on accident, they’ve known one another for two short years, and he is saying he will stand as her second, with everything that entails.</p><p>“He will come down on your family, too.” She whispers. The only bugs left, the only ones she left behind, are far enough away that the barely breathed words will not even register.</p><p>“Only if we fail. And I’d like to think that between the two of us, we might just succeed.” Bail is equally quiet and puts a hand around her shoulder. “You aren’t doing this alone anymore.”</p><p>And her training takes a new track after that. It is fresher, more invigorated. Her battlemaster is stern with them both and while Breha continues to best Bail, he starts catching up. As they become equals in combat, they become closer in their daily life.</p><p>Soon, they are splitting rent instead of asking their separate parents to pay outlandish Coruscanti rent, both laughing as they get off the holos with their respective families, the other staying carefully out of frame. <em>My roommate is out right</em> <em>now, </em>they say, <em>but I promise I'll try to set something up so you can meet them. </em></p><p>For all Alderaan is forward thinking in many respects, it is not uncommon, particularly in the nobility, to keep the male and female children from living with one another. Before marriage, at the least. An old tradition with no end in sight, but they have navigated harder.</p><p>The move has the added benefit of removing her from the bugged space that she has lived in for years. And in that freedom, she finds herself opening up so carefully about different things.</p><p>Never without prompting – she still hesitates to tell Bail<em> anything, </em>but he not only agrees with her, he wants to help.</p><p>Her battlemaster is suspicious of him, still. Says he could be a well-timed plant. And she may be right, but Breha did not realize how desperate she was for social connection until finally she had it and she almost wonders…</p><p>If she still goes out trying to take out the King, will it be worth it to have known Bail? To have had a friend for whatever length of time she might get with him?</p><p>Yes, she thinks. If she fails, at least she will have known this happiness.</p><p>Giving up would be what her mother, if she had any confirmation of Breha’s plans, would want. She wants her daughters safe, wants her family out of the King’s scrutiny and the public eye. She wants things to return to a normal Breha hardly remembers, a normal her sister has never known. And while Breha thinks she may suspect, Breha has been careful never to let her plans come out, come to light. The deniability may save her mother and sister, if it comes to that.</p><p>Another part of Breha wants to lash out against her mother. How can it be right to want normalcy? How can she stand by and watch as Alderaan projects its generosity and kindness to the galaxy while choking its own people? Breha refuses to sit back on this, but she will not push her mother into any form of involvement. She will shock her mother, if she must, with the news that her daughter is a traitor in the name of her uncle’s alleged crimes.</p><p>In the name of the miscarriage of justice that was her uncle’s execution. Breha still cannot, no matter how much she digs, find a trace of evidence that the King was right in convicting him. But the steadily increasing number of public executions, of banishments, and of arrests of people close to the King for similar charges is telling, at least to Breha.</p><p>Bail’s family has played it as safe as they can, fading into the background. Lower noble houses are working at minimizing their presence in the capital and pulling attention away from them, and Bail’s family is trying to encourage him away from Breha, to get him away from someone who already has the King’s attentions. Coruscanti gossip makes its way around Alderaan rather quickly, after all, and one must always watch who their friends are. </p><p>Bail stays by her side. In some sense, his loyalty feels like a confirmation of his sincerity to stand beside her once he pieced together what she was planning to do. In another sense, it feels like a warning that he may be acting on the King’s orders.</p><p>Breha doesn’t know. She will not know until the moment comes, but she knows that until then she must cherish these moments.</p><p>Their apartment is cramped and small with two people living in it, but it smells of Alderaanian food, it is filled with laughter, debate, with Alderaanian music.</p><p>They are both people with a deep love of Alderaan. Of her people and her culture. If Bail does betray her, Breha can take some solace knowing that he did so out of love for his planet, just as she plans a treachery out of the same.</p><p>The moment comes sooner than she expected. It comes swifter and harsher than she expected and it aches and gnaws at something within her that her treason would start the same way it began.</p><p>Because she gets the news her sister has been taken by the King. Taken captive. And Breha knows that her studies must wait, her treason cannot delay.</p><p>She is to challenge the King of Alderaan, and the feeling under her skin demands she challenge him <em>now.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The King trusts Breha as far as he can throw her, but he also knows that he has to keep an image up. She's been on Alderaan and she hasn't caused problems so he can't punish her for anything and force her to stay on world. He wants people to think he can be forgiving, even against his enemies. If anyone wants this story from the King's perspective, I might just write that and Bail's perspective, give it a little side trilogy of it's own.<br/>2. Older institutions are slower to change, hence all this stuff about the nobility having to bow to different color symbolisms and whatnot. The rest of Alderaan might know of it and understand it, but culturally it isn't as big of a deal outside the nobility and monarchy.<br/>3. Is it a bit foolish to send her away where he can't control her? Yes. Is he hoping he can play the long game and get some level of loyalty by showing trust? Yes, but only as much as he knows that granting this also reduces her opportunity to inspire rebellion on Alderaan. Am I implying that if all went as the prequels did in this universe Leia would get her rebellion and sense of justice from Breha? A little bit, but Bail would absolutely have contributed to it.<br/>4. Whoever is of higher prestige is the one whose last name gets used in an Alderaanian marriage in this 'verse (i.e., on Alderaan you marry up, not down by tradition. If you're outside of the limited circles where this remains relevant at the time of canon, no one really cares who uses which name). Since that is Breha, Bail takes her last name. I don't know if this was confirmed in the prequels or any other canon or not, so I'm clarifying it here that Organa is indeed Breha's last name and Bail's married name. I'm building this off his full name in Legends canon being "Bail Prestor Organa".<br/>5. Okay, no. Bail isn't a plant. But what Breha is doing has isolated her and I kind of wanted to hit on that with this logical/emotional dichotomy in her head where she knows she should start being more careful because he could be a plant but she is so desperate to connect with <i>somebody</i> that it is hard to care if he is or not.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Un/Matched</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alderaan is still, its colors dulled when the transport they take home lands. She does not stop at the bottom of the ram, does not look to her parents. She strides to the King and she meets only his eyes.</p><p>“You have betrayed everything you are meant to stand for as King. In the name of Alderaan, in the name of her people, and in the name of her suffering, I declare a challenge.”</p><p>The stillness does not end. The small movements do not disrupt the way the feeling under her skin sinks and roots itself here, now, in this very moment. Bail is behind her, at her right shoulder, and he looks over to his own parents, here by his request.</p><p>Bail looks very much like his mother. Breha hopes she does not have to look her in the face and apologize for Bail’s death should this challenge go poorly. She hopes this challenge ends in Alderaan’s favor.</p><p>Her mother is the first to break anything. She storms forward. “Breha! You can’t…”</p><p>The King raises a hand to silence her, cuts her with a look that demands her compliance, because her mother has focused so much on survival she has not focused on protection. She must, in some way, only see to tomorrow because she knows how quickly tomorrow gets stripped away.</p><p>Breha can see past tomorrow, and she knows her safety, Sira’s safety, they were never guaranteed. And now the King has acted on his implicit threats as he has on so many others.</p><p>“I accept. We meet at dawn, in the square, Lady Organa. Be sure to wear something red – I’m sure your dear mother and sister need not see so much blood spilled from your heart.” He implicates her family in this, as she knew he would, but she still cannot ignore the cold shock of it. Cannot pretend it doesn’t hit her fears.</p><p>He says it like a promise and Breha doesn’t have time to retort before Bail moves to stand beside her now, no longer behind. “House Prestor stands with House Organa. I offer myself as the lady Breha’s second.”</p><p>First name… He is taking a liberty here that would normally have her mother frustrated and a tad flustered, but it merely drains <em>his </em>mother’s face of blood and makes Breha’s own falter.</p><p>Bail’s parents meet with Breha’s mother as the square becomes enlivened by the promise of blood spilled in the morning. Blood of a traitor, they say, or blood of a King.</p><p>She hears more than one whisper of <em>what of the blood of a Queen? </em>She elects to ignore those. She has no evidence that she will win.</p><p>House Prestor finds themselves welcomed into her family’s home. Her mother offers Bail’s mother a drink and both sit with Bail’s father in a mute horror.</p><p>Sira is still in the King’s captivity. Breha has marked herself a traitor and Bail has declared all intentions of standing with her. What a duo of disappointment they must make.</p><p>“You were supposed to be the level-headed one, Bail.”</p><p>“That’s what you used to say of Drimor, but look how that turned out.”</p><p>“Drimor grew out of his eccentricities, he didn’t grow into domestic terror and treason!”</p><p>“How is this domestic terror?” Breha looks between their mothers. “I haven’t performed any such acts, neither has Bail. We have merely issued a challenge in the name of justice for Alderaan.”</p><p>“Breha, we could have gotten justice some other way. Or, we could have waited for the King to die. He’s growing older with every passing year, it’s only a matter of time.”</p><p>“He’s in his fifties mother. Yes, he’s on the older side which may make him easier to defeat in battle, but he could still have another fifty years of life, minimum. He has access to the best our planet can offer in healthcare and a lifestyle that is meant to keep him alive. How long would you see our people, our planet, <em>our family </em>suffer?”</p><p>“And what do you do when he’s defeated?”</p><p>“I take the throne!”</p><p>Her mother scowls. “You take the throne? You’re twenty-two, Breha!”</p><p>“And he was twenty when he took the throne.” She shakes her head. “And how can I be any worse, even at my age, than him?”</p><p>Bail’s mother sighs. “You both really intend to go through with this.”</p><p>“Yes, Mother.”</p><p>Bail is still at Breha’s side.</p><p>Lady Prestor laughs. “You would have the most stubborn of children.”</p><p>Breha’s mother shakes her head. “That is an understatement. I have long since given up any quest of controlling Breha. I had thought, though, I taught her some kind of <em>restraint.</em>”</p><p>Mother looks to Breha. It has been… so long. Breha considers her family, considers her “<em>her mother” </em>but she has not thought of her as Mother in so long.</p><p>She shakes her head. “Don’t do this. Rescind your challenge – he may let you get away with banishment.”</p><p>He will not. They both know it.</p><p>“I will either take the throne or die trying. But he has done too much damage, and now he takes Sira to hold her over our heads and make us bow to his pressure.</p><p>“But what stops him, once we are cowed? What keeps him from killing her, too?”</p><p>Her mother has no response. She shakes her head. In the years since her uncle’s death, Breha and her mother have differed, consistently, in this. Her mother sees safety in obedience and in playing, publicly, to the King. In hiding herself from him in order to do work on the side that might undo his damages.</p><p>She has worked with people who have been hurt by the King’s policies or actions, Breha knows. Discreetly, and with great caution, but she does what she can when she can. She is under his watch, but not always. Not as he has watched Breha.</p><p>Breha, in some sense, can appreciate that their public differences have allowed her mother some measure of cover. Breha, drawing attention to herself, knows her public image is tainted. She hardly has any marriage prospects on Alderaan, and she knows the rumors that were running when she finished her secondary schooling. People expected her to leave. To never come back, to be one of those children who used her status to break free of the King.</p><p>But she is back. And she will not let this stand. Her mother resigns herself, as her father and Bail’s parents do, to the coming morning. They prepare a small meal, but conversation is still tense and quiet.</p><p>Breha sleeps. She does not know how, but something in the power under her skin coaxes her into rest and she is awake with plenty of time before first light. Plenty of time to dress, to find Bail, to wake him and ensure they are both prepared.</p><p>Their parents make a show of standing with the King. While both of them know it is necessary – if they die, their parents need deniability, need some visible claim they had disowned their own children -  there is a sting in Breha’s heart at it. At seeing all of her tension with her mother manifest in her mother standing in opposition to her on the field.</p><p>Breha breathes in. She will free Sira, that is her first act as Queen.</p><p>Bail…</p><p>Bail is too good. Too kind. He is such a sweet and gentle man, and she knows it would kill her to put him in a position where he must falter in that, where he must take the life of his King. No matter how just he sees it, no matter how much he supports it, Breha cannot let him.</p><p>She will take the King’s life. She will not allow her second to step foot on the field.</p><p>Alderaanian tradition calls for bladed combat. A test of skill, a measure of whether one is worth putting on the throne.</p><p>Breha is glad her battlemaster spent so much <em>time </em>on blades.</p><p>By the time dawn comes and she is to face him down, she sees the King for who he really is.</p><p>A human man, pale with the fear that has dogged his steps since he started seeing treasons everywhere. Older than her mother, in his fifties, and still so confident in his ability to win this fight; he is a man of paradox.</p><p>Breha breathes in. She will not initiate the charge. She is the defender of Alderaan, she will not set the precedent of being the aggressor.</p><p>She does not have to wait long. The King has the good sense of the gods not to open with taunts. However this battle ends, their words will be remembered, will be relayed and mutilated in the histories. She has wrestled her anger into determination, into closed lips and a steady fire. She will not give the histories anything but her actions this day.</p><p>He comes in high, and it is like her battlemaster is sparring her in training all over. It is like the countless times she has faced off against Bail. It is training battle after training battle where she had to learn to swing up, to block and parry just so that she could pull her blade and swing it down and around into Bail's left side.</p><p>The King fights with a different weapon than she has fought against in the past. It is an advantage for him for several moments, and she will bear a scar on her arm, forever marking this day on her skin. She manages a quick parry and dodges toward his left flank. She had acted on instinct – Bail fights from the right, and he always leaves his left flank open.</p><p>The King is not so foolish. His flank is covered and it nearly costs Breha her life.</p><p>It clicks just shy of too late. She feels the blade sink into her side, and she can feel – not see, for Bail is behind her and her eyes cannot see him but she can <em>feel</em> him – when Bail stands to take her place. To take up her cause and fight the King to the death.</p><p>Because Bail is honorable. He is sweet, gentle, kind, and honorable. And he will stand as her second just as he declared, even if it gets both of them killed.</p><p>She refuses. She rejects that reality, and she will push her own into existence come whatever hells await her in the After.</p><p>She forces herself to stay standing for all she wants to take a knee. Her lung, her left lung, it <em>burns</em>.</p><p>She cannot delay. She waits a half-second, then a quarter-second more. The King is approaching, no doubt to finish the job.</p><p>She feels that same whisper that has followed her throughout her life. She feels it sing in her bones and prompt – <em>now</em> – and she plunges her blade into his neck.</p><p>The King is dead, long live the Queen.</p><p>Somehow, in the moments as she feels herself bleeding, as she struggles to stay standing and to ensure that he is, indeed, dead (plunging her blade through his skull does the trick) she has just shy of a half-moment to think.</p><p>And victory is shallow. It is somehow far less than it feels like it should be, but then she is also…</p><p>Also…</p><p>Al… so.</p><p>She loses her awareness in the moment between painful, labored breaths.</p><p>*</p><p>Bail had signed on to be Breha’s second. He wonders if she realized what he meant when he said that. As it is, when he sees Breha collapse on the battlefield, at the end of the battle, he is the first one on the field.</p><p>There are no rules left to observe. Breha is the winner, the new Queen of Alderaan. She has won her throne and there can be no contest, not under Alderaanian law, for at least a year.</p><p>He knows there are loyalists, there always are; that they have only a year to sway as many as possible.</p><p>But there is a whisper already through the crowd. Someone shouts about getting the Queen a medic, and Bail is the one to help carry her to the doctor they do, eventually, find. He is the one to follow her to the hospital, even as their parents all follow behind, somber and weighted with what has happened today.</p><p>He is the one to sit there and watch, and the one Breha’s mother turns to after she has to make what must be a difficult decision.</p><p>Does she authorize the removal of her daughter’s lungs for the replacement of pulmonodes? Of prosthetics? Or does she say risk the surgery, see what can be salvaged?</p><p>Her mother, Bail realizes, wants his input.</p><p>“Breha would wear her wounds proudly.” He shakes his head. “And at least with pulmonodes she may recover quicker.”</p><p>Whatever good health she may get from the pulmonodes, whatever quick recoveries she may be blessed with, won't last forever. Eventually, the weight of the pulmonodes will start limiting her range of motion and will start to show themselves in her health. But it was safer, in the long term. She would, in all likelihood, survive having the prosthetics implanted.</p><p>There was no such guarantee if they asked the doctors to salvage what they could, to try transplanting an organ her body may reject.</p><p>Lady Organa nods. “I had thought the same thing. It has been many years since my daughter and I spoke, though. You seem to know her better than I do.”</p><p>While Lady Organa completes the talk with the doctors, Bail’s mother sits next to him.</p><p>“We need to plan for your future, Bail. Evidently, we couldn’t count on you to be the quiet sibling.”</p><p>“No. But at least my teenage rebellion was interesting.”</p><p>She doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t know that he found it funny, either. For one, he isn’t really a <em>teenager</em> anymore. Second, he just committed a treason, successfully. He was the strongest supporter of the woman who overthrew the King.</p><p>He was the strongest supporter of the new Queen.</p><p>Breha is his Queen now.</p><p>Something about that sits right in his chest. He smiles a bit. “I’m going to sleep far too well tonight.”</p><p>The adrenaline crash ensures that he does.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Little bit of Bail's perspective.<br/>I'm officially, on this story, writing the same chapter that I have to get out next Monday. Not where I <i>like</i> being, but I'll make it happen.<br/>1. We start getting a better impression of Breha's mother because Breha herself is older. Not only does she catch onto these things more easily, but she's also feeling very sentimental in a sort of "oh shit I might die tomorrow" kind of way. She's got her issues with her mother, but they're set aside in favor of "this might be the last time I'm with her."<br/>2. The King is absolutely a cocky bastard who thinks he can dominate the field and that he has this well in hand, but he also has that little, insidious voice in the back of his head going "but what if you fail?" but because he has been the kind of ruler he has been, failure could still be deadly. If Breha dies on the battlefield after declaring a challenge in the name of Alderaan, he risks her becoming a martyr and a revolution starting.<br/>3. There is a time and place for battlefield banter, but this did not feel like it and I didn't really feel like writing it. It felt wrong to have that kind of back and forth so I wanted the battle to stand on its own without monologues or witty asides from either character. It also didn't feel like it fit the character I've established for Breha, given she has spent so long <i>not speaking</i> that to suddenly start coming forward with all her grievances as she's fighting the battle she's been preparing for the majority of her life would be an inversion of what I've tried to establish.<br/>4. Look, man, I play a lot of Assassin's Creed; I had to get a boss arm scar in there somewhere.<br/>5. Another "Look, man," moment, but all this reference to gods and hells and the "After" (Alderaanian afterlife) are... because I also really like mythology. I just. It's fun to design and play around with and all that, so it kinda crops up here and there. I don't know that we'll get much more Alderaanian mythology, though if I ever write Bail's perspective we might get a bit more about the religion itself.<br/>6. When Breha has a lung that's been cut into it is literally <i>just</i> the Force, adrenaline, and sheer determination keeping her up, hence why a few seconds later she passes out. I had a self-defense instructor who was ex-special forces who used to talk about how people can keep going in a fight for at least a few seconds, even when they've been badly wounded. It isn't that they don't feel it or they're not suffering the consequences, it's that survival instinct, if it leans towards fight, pushes them to keep going.<br/>7. Breha isn't ensuring he's dead for anyone but herself. Everyone watching the battle watched her stab him in the neck, but she's going a little in-and-out from blood loss and pain and this battle has been in her mind for years. <i>She</i> needs to confirm he's dead.<br/>8. Breha didn't expect some vainglorious image of victory, but she's so numb right now (she's about to pass out) that nothing feels real. That's what she means when she thinks that it feels far less than it should - it feels like she's completely detached and like she might have dreamed it.<br/>9. Breha's mom asks Bail because she realizes that Bail knows Breha far better than she does. Years of distance between them mean that while she, as a mother, wants to say transplant and try to save as much of her original "form" as possible because she worries about the consequences of pulmonodes when she's only 22, she needs perspective from someone who knows her daughter. And Bail knows that Breha was ready for whatever consequences the battle would have, including death, so some artificial lungs won't be the end of the world for her.<br/>10. Bail is 1000% coming down from an adrenaline high.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Re/Turn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Breha knows she had times that she awoke without really waking. But when she finally has her awareness returned to her, she feels a weight on her chest like nothing she has ever felt before. She sits up, manages a bit, and then looks around the hospital room around her.</p><p>She is not restrained, so she must have succeeded. The battle is hazy in her memory as she tries to piece together the situation around her.</p><p>Bail is at her side, her mother at her other. Bail laughs when she scrunches her face up.</p><p>“You’d think you were waking up for a test, not waking up from battle.”</p><p>“Oh, gods abound, I didn’t graduate.”</p><p>That inspires another round of laughter from Bail. He must still be coming down from the battle.</p><p>“How long has he been dead?”</p><p>She has to say it, has to feel the words in her mouth. Her mother’s lips thin and she looks more than a little put-out that Breha’s first question is the death of the King.</p><p>“You missed the funeral.” Bail is still sitting beside her, but he’s calmer now. He should be an adviser – he’s got the right head for it.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“They wanted to keep you sedated while your body adjusted to the pulmonodes.”</p><p>She glances down. That would explain the weight on her chest. She lost her lungs but gained her freedom – she’ll take it.</p><p>“Sira?”</p><p>“Sira is fine. Shaken from her time in custody, but the doctors assured us all that her wounds are superficial.”</p><p>“The King knew you would rebel if she was hurt worse, it seems.” Her mother speaks now. “It just seems that he didn’t count on you rebelling the second you set foot on Alderaan.”</p><p>“It worked.”</p><p>That’s what she has to hold on to. It worked. Her family, Bail’s family, all the people of Alderaan. They’re safe.</p><p>“You’re to be coronated once the doctors say you’re well enough.” Bail glances to her mother. “And there is something to be said for your mother’s position on the matter.”</p><p>Her mother sighs. “I did not say it as a requirement, Bail. I said it as a suggestion for both of your safety.”</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>Her mother is a political mind, Breha has always known this. But her mother plays the long game where she sometimes shouldn’t just as Breha favors the efficient play where sometimes a better mind might stay her hand in favor of waiting. Her mother straightens. “The last King ran into a spot of trouble with more traditional supporters; these loyalists will be more easily swayed if you come into the position with a marriage already in the process of being made.</p><p>“The last King had only his daughter and his wife had been dead ten years. You know as well as I do that the ‘heir and a spare’ mentality has never faded from our nobility.”</p><p>Because too many times, even with medicine and all the miracles it could provide, families died out because they only had one child. Because they were ill-prepared when the tides of politics, famine, or disease turned their family line into ash.</p><p>“And the King only had his daughter.”</p><p>“You have a year, Breha, before challenges become legitimate. The quickest and easiest sway will be these traditionalists.”</p><p>The pulmonodes, though, may limit her ability to have children. The stress on her system from the pulmonodes may make carrying children fatal, if it doesn’t make it wholly impossible. She says as much, to which her mother, ever sharp, glances between her and Bail. “You can adopt. There is nothing in Alderaanian tradition against that, and we have many examples over the last millennia of rulers adopted into the family.</p><p>“But the idea is that they are brought up in Alderaanian tradition. Two parents, raised in Aldera, and taught our traditions, our languages, our classical texts, at the minimum.</p><p>“I’m sure there is plenty you yourself will have to learn, but the point is we can make this easier if you are willing to accept a marriage.”</p><p>“And how do I know that whoever you have in mind won’t kill me?”</p><p>Bail huffs a bit at that. “I stood with you in battle – I’d hardly kill you.”</p><p>Breha glances to him. They’ve danced around it. They’ve lived together and planned and schemed and studied together, but they have never said anything about the ether between them; how could they, if they might die in the execution of their plan? “I can’t ask this of you, when you’ve already done so much for me.”</p><p>“Which is why your mother, quite conveniently, did not ask me or my family. My mother asked yours. Makes it seem like a power-play, too, which might win you some sympathy. Married off, and all, while recovering from battle.</p><p>“It seems both our mothers have been colluding.”</p><p>It could also undermine her reign, at least in some respects. True, many Alderaanian marriages have at least nominal investment by the parents, especially in the arrangement of the event or the negotiations around the marriage, even for love-matches in the nobility or for general marriages in the broader population. But she doesn’t <em>know</em> the other nobles, doesn’t know how to predict their actions or reactions.</p><p>She probably should have worked harder on meeting them and learning about them.</p><p>But she has a more pressing concern.  </p><p>“Do you want this?”</p><p>Does Bail want a life in the spotlight, does he want to be King? Does he want to follow Breha’s treasons through into the political life they’ve carved for her?</p><p>“I don’t know that I would want to be King, I’ll admit. It would feel too much like stealing your victory.</p><p>“But there is an option, should you be open to the marriage, for me to remain as consort. We’ve lived together for nearly a year now, and we know we get along well. I see no reason why this marriage couldn’t work well for the both of us.”</p><p>And Breha feels a sense of relief, of excitement that is purely joyful, and of calm all at once.</p><p>“So we are to be married.”</p><p>Her mother is rolling her eyes and pinching her nose. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say you’ve been living with a man without my knowledge for nearly a year. But congratulations to the both of you, Queen Organa and future Consort Prestor-Organa.”</p><p>“I don’t know.” Bail’s smile is all joke and charisma. “I like the sound of Consort Organa.”</p><p>And maybe, just maybe, that is enough for her in the moment. The jokes, the levity, the bright feeling around the room, around Alderaan. The choking feeling that has followed her since she was ten has subsided. She doesn’t feel her uncle’s blood on her cheek.</p><p>She nods at that. “Where <em>is</em> Sira?”</p><p>“Recovering at home.” Her mother smiles. She seemed more than glad to return, and she decided <em>your </em>room was where she would be sleeping for the foreseeable future. You may have to share when we get home.”</p><p>Breha is fine with that. And while their mothers keep them occupied for another hour or so, eventually they leave and it is just Breha and Bail.</p><p>“So, what plans do you have now?”</p><p>“First? See my sister.”</p><p>“And politically?”</p><p>And politically. That’s the great question before Breha. She has spent years studying monarchs benevolent and terrible just as Bail has spent years studying the legacies of democracy.</p><p>“We make Alderaan someplace we’d be glad to see the next generation walk.”</p><p>Bail nods at that. They start talking, planning, and it passes the few hours that are left of her time before the doctors say her family can move her out of the room, take her home, and let her recover there with supervision.</p><p>Breha suspects they want the Queen out of the hospital, because she notices the security around it with her there. That is…</p><p>She’s been dodging these same security officials for most of her life. Are they really so easily changing loyalties?</p><p>“Worry later, Breha.” Bail whispers, and then he follows it with a joke that has her laughing for seconds, until the pulmonodes feel like they’re stretching the raw skin around them.</p><p>“Apologies.”</p><p>The guards glance back, as though the slight indicator of her pain is enough to warrant concern. She’s lost her lungs, yes, but won a battle. Surely, they know she is capable?</p><p>The trip back to her childhood home is, for Breha, full of anticipation. Her sister… what kind of shape will she find Sira in? What kind of harm will have been done to her in Breha’s absence?</p><p>Will Sira ever forgive Breha? Will she hold her responsible for her harm as much as Breha does?</p><p>Sira is sitting in Breha’s room, back against the headboard of Breha’s bed and knees up to her chin. She isn’t really <em>looking </em>at anything. She just stares ahead, as though nothing around her is real.</p><p>Breha is gentle, soft even, when she sits in front of her. Is careful to sit where she is seen, where Sira can take the time to notice and process that her sister is there with her.</p><p>“You came back.”</p><p>“For you.”</p><p>Sira’s face contorts at that. “He said you wouldn’t. That you had run away to the Core and wouldn’t come home, not even for me or Mother.”</p><p>“I would come home for you. It doesn’t matter where I am, I will <em>always</em> come home for you two.”</p><p>“You’re Queen, now. That’s what Mother said. You’re going to have more responsibilities, and you can’t drop everything for us.”</p><p>“I would have asked Mother to wait before telling you that, but I suppose you might have found out anyway.”</p><p>“It’s all over the news, the upstart that took the throne.”</p><p>Sira stops talking suddenly. She’s still, like she’s stopped breathing.</p><p>“We can worry about these problems now, or later.”</p><p>She barely whispers a <em>later</em> that Breha can here, and Breha is so close to her. Breha may never know what happened to her at the King’s hands. She isn’t sure she wants to.</p><p>She will ask Bail – if they are to be married, she can respect him enough not to make unilateral decisions about their household – but she will do what she can to at least invite her sister into her household. Into her home, under her protection where she can try to recover.</p><p>When Sira is ready, Breha will step aside. Just as once she vowed herself that she would remove the King from power, she knows she will hold to this. When Sira is ready – when she comes to Breha, if she even agrees to <em>stay</em> with Breha, and says she is ready and wants to strike out on her own Breha will acknowledge and honor it.</p><p>It is what she wanted from her mother, it is what she seized for herself.</p><p>When she brings it up to Bail, he nods. He is somber, as always. “Absolutely. She will need safety, and if she will feel safer with you, then she should stay with us.”</p><p>The dinner they are meant to have with their family is fifteen minutes out. They don’t have enough time now to plan everything for their future, but Bail puts a hand, gentle as he is, on her shoulder. “I wanted to talk to you about something else. I know we don’t have much time, but I hope you know that regardless of how we sort titles, I intend to support you and your reign as your husband.”</p><p>Breha smiles. She has had a life of doubts, it sometimes feels, but this?</p><p>“I am glad I can count on you, Bail. And I hope that our reign is prosperous, and that any children we have, by birth or adoption, can continue that legacy.”</p><p>It strikes Breha when she goes to sleep that night that for the first time, despite not having lungs anymore, she is able to breathe. Properly, without fear, and without reservation.</p><p>She has done it. She has secured her safety. Hers, her sisters, and her mother’s.</p><p>Only part of her, as she slips into sleep on an exhale, mourns that her father did not live long enough to see it. The rest of her is too tired and too joyful to note it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. "I didn't graduate" may have. Been entirely thrown out there as a comic relief moment.<br/>2. The loyalist stuff and the stuff with the last King might make more sense when I come in and expound on this note (putting this up on time with the understanding I'll come back in for better notes later, when I'm not as pressed on time).<br/>3. Yeah, they have an arranged marriage, but they still have a solid foundation for it.<br/>4. Sira does stay with Breha and Bail for several years. I may swing her into the main story, I haven't decided yet, but she does stay with them. The only reason she wasn't as involved in Obi-Wan's story (aka didn't show up) outside of me not having made her yet, is that she was off doing other work to help Breha so meeting the Jedi wasn't necessary.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Un/Done</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Our final chapter, friends. </p><p>I'm glad for those of you who have stuck around for this ride! I hope you're enjoying the main story, if you've been keeping up with that one!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Clone Wars were over. Things had…</p><p>Things had ended. That was the most Bail could say for it. Things had ended and Breha had kept her head and their planet above water, had kept things from burning around her as the galaxy itself started to fall apart.</p><p>Bail, meanwhile, had been stuck in the Senate deadlocks that were ever more vain attempts to prevent the Chancellor from taking more power. Power he wasn’t due, even in the emergency sessions.</p><p>He had worn himself down. He is grayer now than his father was at this age, though on their calls Breha never seems to mind. Still, being home and knowing how things had ended…</p><p>It is good to breathe Alderaan air, to have stepped down from the Senate, and to have decided to focus on his family. His wife, and the child they are planning to adopt, the family they want to finally build.</p><p>Breha is holding court when he arrives, and he slips into the back. She stands for much of court, as much as she can, and she is standing now. He has come at the peak of the time, it would seem, and he enjoys watching his wife stand in all her office as she rules over her people.</p><p>She has worked so hard to remain a just leader. She has kept detailed records of her thinking, in order to find a way to teach it to their heirs, and he finds that he wants to do that himself. They are getting ready, closer every day, to adopting children and he wants to pass down what he has learned in these last, arduous years.</p><p>He wants to commemorate the brave, the fallen, and those that lost themselves to the battlefield. He thinks of some of the men, how they came back to Coruscant with pieces of themselves left on battlefields far flung.</p><p>There is a long recovery ahead for the Republic. For all of them, Bail knows, but the Republic, it seems, was the most tarnished. People don’t have faith in the Senate anymore, they want to pull powers from the office of Chancellor and reinstate localized powers within systems and planets. It’s not a bad idea, if they’re careful about it, but Bail worries at the strong push for immediate reform.</p><p>Moving some of the power around, shifting it so there is more balance and local interests still have some force to meet them is one thing. Overhauling the system in such a way the Senate becomes meaningless once again, this time in a new fashion, is just asking for war to return.</p><p>Bail has learned so much, has forgotten so much more, and will remember these years as the hardest of his life.</p><p>Breha has been a bright spot. His wife and his people, his home. The people he befriended, especially within the Jedi Order…</p><p>Mace Windu would be coming to Alderaan on the insistence of both Master Yoda and his own Master for his recovery. He was badly injured, and likely would be Temple-bound for the majority of his remaining life, only able to go on low-stakes missions.</p><p>And if Bail had learned anything from his acquaintance with Obi-Wan, it was that even low-stakes missions could go horribly wrong.</p><p>Even when no one else knew where you were, or what you were doing.</p><p>Bail sighs. He will be setting down soon. He will be setting down, then he will be home, and then…</p><p>Then…</p><p>He doesn’t know what purpose drives him now. He has had purpose since the day he met Breha, and it has pushed him to heights he never thought possible as the otherwise unremarkable second son of a lower Noble family in the Alderaanian Court. He had become a traitor, committed treason, helped overthrow a government, gotten married, become a Prince Consort, <em>helped restructure his homeworld’s entire government</em>, and then had become a Senator and managed to keep all of that, in true Alderaanian tradition, within the sphere of ‘private’. Within the sphere of ‘home world politics’.</p><p>And now the shadow of a near-Empire was hovering over the specter of a once-great Republic. One that needed people to help rebuild it.</p><p>Did he have it in him to rebuild and restructure a failing system again? Did he have any choice?</p><p>Padme was already preparing things, so were Mon Mothma and Riyo Chuchi. They were the ones Bail was close with – the Delegation of 2000 was growing in the wake of the powers that they were trying to pry away from the office of Chancellor. And while Bail was against instituting any sort of group power at the head of the Senate, both for fear of infighting and the fear of establishing any oligarchic system formally or informally, he understood the worry.</p><p>They needed better balances. Better checks. Unfortunately, calling duels on the Chancellor wasn’t a viable route; even if it had been, that might have just put Palpatine in power sooner.</p><p>He walks into the palace and almost doesn’t notice Breha, who is waiting for him but also preoccupied by a long piece of legislation in front of her.</p><p>“I can’t believe them.” She looks up. “Oh, Bail, you’re here.”</p><p>She puts it down and now he has her full attention. As long as he has known her, her attention always went to what was in front of her. He admired that, never able to keep his focus that way for very long. It was one of many qualities he loved and envied in his wife.</p><p>“And how long is your stay?”</p><p>“As long as my Queen wishes.”</p><p>An old flirtation, but one that still has her laughing. She is genuinely joyful, now, not like when he had left.</p><p>He had last left her before Skywalker and Jinn nearly died at Dooku’s hand over Coruscant, before everything started to come down in the favor of the Republic and then against her all at once. And when he had left, Breha’s eyes had creased at the corner with worry as the same smile he remembers from their years in college came out. Tight and guarded and every bit the consummate politician.</p><p>Or rebel. She’s always been a rebel, for all rebellion put her in a political office as monarch.</p><p>“Really, now, Bail. How long are you staying?”</p><p>He pauses. He always has an answer, always knows how long he has with his wife before his work for his home takes him back to Coruscant, back into the Core where they met, but now… but now…</p><p>“I don’t know.”</p><p>“I think you do.” She kisses his cheek. “But I’ll let you think it over.”</p><p>“Breha, I don’t know.”</p><p>She doesn’t… She doesn’t <em>do that</em>. That thing others do where they act like he is behind or out of the joke, that isn’t how Breha works, but…</p><p>But the Clones were loyal soldiers. Until they were forced not to be.</p><p>But…</p><p>She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Bail, I think I wasn’t clear. You will know when it is right, if it ever is, for you to go back. But however long you need to stay here, stay at home, I support you. If you need to step away from the Senate, I support you.”</p><p>He holds her tightly to him. He is taller than her, just enough that she has to tilt her head a bit to rest her chin on his shoulder. She doesn’t say anything, though, instead holding him just as closely. “Oh, Bail.”</p><p>She puts a hand on the back of his head, steadying him not unlike times she would reach over with a hand on his shoulder, or on his neck, during their training sessions on Coruscant, so very long ago.</p><p>When Coruscant was the home of knowledge and where he lived in a tiny little apartment with Breha, filled with laughter and homework and spirited argument.</p><p>He sighs. He had tried to find that apartment. The building had been retrofitted for another purpose, the apartment destroyed for all the memories weren’t.</p><p>“Come home, Bail. Properly home, for a little while.”</p><p>“I can’t. They need me.”</p><p>“It doesn’t have to be forever, not yet.” She hasn’t let him go, not until this very second where she still keeps an arm around him as she guides him toward their more private rooms. “You have a strong administration, you can work through holo, take a bit of a sabbatical or a vacation. You need time to rest, Bail, like anyone.</p><p>“You need to heal, too.”</p><p>“I didn’t do any of the fighting.”</p><p>Not like Kenobi or Skywalker had. Not like Vos or Jinn had. Or Windu. Or any of the thousands of clones, dead and alive. He hadn’t <em>fought</em>.</p><p>“No, but you worked so hard to try and keep the Republic from collapsing. You fought a different battle, and you didn’t stop, not once.” She holds him. “Work from home for a time. Work here, recuperate.”</p><p>“I can’t rest while-“</p><p>“We can welcome Jedi and clones alike here, let them recuperate here. Wouldn’t be the first time someone found a home here after a rough time.”</p><p>Bail thinks of the half murmured, half joking story that Obi-Wan had told him during the war of what happened after he left Alderaan. Bail had been horrified. While he had worried something like that was happening, he had not wanted the bright, if somewhat subdued, young man who had come to help them to get wrapped up in it like he had. Nevertheless, Obi-Wan had endured and become someone formidable in the time between his departure from Alderaan and the next time Bail saw him in conjunction with the war.</p><p>They can welcome some Jedi to heal, they can welcome the soldiers that defended them to heal, to see something of the Republic other than war. They can start here, and he sees what she finally means.</p><p>He can start here, too. He can start to heal here before going back to Coruscant to do the work he needs to do.</p><p>“What about our plans?”</p><p>What about their plans to adopt a little girl when the war ended? To start raising Breha’s heir, now that they had a better understanding of what values they wanted to teach the next Queen of Alderaan?</p><p>“We can start looking now, for a child to adopt. In the meantime, we focus on getting you better. If I have to do most of the raising at first, because you have to help the Republic, I certainly won’t begrudge you – you know I understand duty.”</p><p>He knows she understands pulling more than her weight in duty and bearing it with as much grace and dignity as she can.</p><p>He kisses her cheek, now, his proper greeting for her since shortly after they married. It finally feels like he’s come home, that little ritual complete.</p><p>“Okay.” He nods. “Okay. I’m home, for at least a while.”</p><p>She smiles. “We can work out the details later.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Doing notes a little differently here, because of time constraints and because I posted this shortly after writing instead of my normal write-edit-note-post system. </p><p>Shorter because it's an epilogue AND because I have to leave for work soon. </p><p>From Bail's perspective, because I knew this epilogue would have a time jump and because then I could hint at some of the end of the Clone Wars and the main story without giving too much away/writing myself into a continuity corner. He would know a lot, but not necessarily think about/know details. I still will have to reference this chapter when I get that far in, but I have some interesting ideas for when we hit end of TCW/beginning of RoTS that I'm working on fleshing out and writing some snippets of that may/may not make it into the actual main story. I'm doing them on a separate doc so I can have some outtakes to share when we get to that point. </p><p>Another reason to show Bail's perspective is to showcase another type of stress and related trauma that I saw coming out of the war: the people who are trying so hard to keep the Republic together but aren't quite able to hold it together. Yeah, it isn't the PTSD of the Clones or the Jedi, but it is another consequence I could see coming out of this kind of massive war, and I thought Bail was a good vessel through which to show that. That, and the nice little parallel between Breha trying to protect him from that and it happening anyway. </p><p>As for Breha, she has settled, somewhat, but she will always protect the people she loves. That includes Bail and that is why she tries to push for him to work from home for some time, to try and get his bearings again. She wants him to take care of himself, but she knows how he is so she knows she might have to help him do that until he gets his head back. And she is more than willing to do that because they do have a fairly strong relationship, and part of that is supporting one another <i>and<i> being there when the other might not realize they've hit their limits. </i></i></p><p> </p><p>  <i><br/><i>Ultimately, I wanted to give some context for the relationship and how Alderaan came out from another perspective. While this is largely Breha's story, Bail is a part of that story and there is something to be said for getting that external perspective: instead of getting the nitty-gritty on the anxieties Breha has faced over the years we see her how the people around her do. A consummate monarch who keeps her head above water and keeps things stable.</i><br/></i></p>
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